Eastern Cup 0.5

This past weekend, a handful of us made the trek to Craftsbury Common, VT for the first set of Eastern Cups for the 2013 season!

On Friday, Chloe and I arrived at the Snyder house in Fairfax for the night, in order to beat the impending storm that would be arriving in the night before the first sprint. In the morning, the three of us (Julia included) drove up to the venue to meet Molly, and Ryan who came up with his home club.

Upon arrival, the place was packed, with almost 400 racers signed up for the days event.

As it got closer to the start time, it began to warm up, creating an interesting race surface: not firm, but not quite slush. My race went okay, coming in 91st in a group of stiff competition, about 25 seconds off of the leader. Behind me was Ryan in 102nd, about 4 seconds behind.

For the women’s race, Chloe and Julia fared about the same as Ryan and I, coming in 90th and 87th respectively. The track had softened up a lot by their race, and it had begun to rain a little.

By the time the Fairfax crew left (around 12:30, as nobody had qualified for the heats), it was raining even harder, and by the time the heats started (about the time we returned home) it was pouring. Maybe it was a good thing that none of us made the heats…

It looks like we all will need a little more sprint training by the time the UNH Carnival rolls around, starting off with a classic sprint.

That night, Catie and Silke came over for dinner and for a place to stay. The next morning, we woke up with three things:

1). A phone call from Molly.

2). No power.

and 3). About a half inch of ice over all of our cars.


Molly had called the house, saying that due to the weather and the horrid driving conditions, that she would not be attending the mornings classic race. This was right before the power went out. Right after this happened, we received word from NENSA that the days event would be cancelled, as to not put the 250+ registrants at risk on the icy roads.

And with that excitement, we spent the next while either indoors in the dark, or outdoors scraping ice off of vehicles. When Silke and I left at 11:30, the Snyders still had no power.

The next race opportunity we have as a team will be the Santa's Revenge skate at Sleepy Hollow on the 28th. See you there!

-Torin.

Training Camp Part 1

The first on-snow camp of the season wrapped up earlier this week after six days of quality training. Steadily improving ski conditions made up for the frigid temperatures throughout most of the week. Everyone on the team showed improvement with technique coaching from our new assistant coach Ian.

We started training camp with a 5km skate time trial on Saturday morning to give the team some racing experience this season, after waiting for the temperatures to rise to a more tolerable 0 degrees. Eli Enman (Molly’s brother) won, with Torin coming in a relatively close second (17:13). Isaiah was next for the men, fourth overall with a time of 19:07. For the ladies, Chloe led the pack in 22:11, with Silke close behind in 22:22.

Between all of our extra training sessions, the team bonded over Christmas celebrations, old ski race footage (that none of us understood, Norwegian maybe?), and Pajamagrams.

On Sunday, in an effort to raise funds for the season, the team went to work at the Vermont Teddy Bear factory for a few hours. While we were there, we helped pack (and ship) boxes for their Pajamagram operation.

In the evenings, we managed to entertain ourselves outdoors despite the temperatures. We spend a couple of nights outside skating, sledding, and sauna-ing, and finding out that Bocce balls make poor alternatives to hockey pucks.

And finally, we ate. A lot. One of the major highlights of training camp is the homemade food we all prepare. Some of this weeks dishes included Christmas Dinner, Burgers, pasta, and egg frittatas. And donuts.

We’re back!

Snow is on the ground, and it is ski season again!
After a productive fall full of time trials and solid training, we are back on snow at our first training camp of the season!
Since we last posted, we are now bigger (and younger) than ever (8 men, 7 women), with a large group of First Years; and are going into our second season with “new” coach Molly Enman (Middlebury ‘97) and our first season with assistant coach Ian Nesbitt (Williams ‘13).
Our captains this season are some familiar faces, with Isaiah St. Pierre ‘15 leading the men’s team, and Silke Hynes ‘14 taking charge of the women.
We are are currently into out THIRD WEEK on snow and in the middle of our first training camp at Sleepy Hollow.

More to come!

-Torin.